How come divisi or sometimes just simply notated as div does not show up in playing techniques? I have added it manually where I need it, but shouldn’t it be there in Dorico? It’s very common in string parts.
Dorico’s native divisi mechanism doesn’t use playing techniques. Here’s the section in the manual:
You can also do it “by hand” if you want, by using chords or multiple voices on one staff, and adding “div.” as staff text or a playing technique.
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I always find that the built in divisi function doesn’t really seem to be suited for cases where you just want multiple notes on a single staff in both parts and score, so I regularly make these playing techniques and use them all the time.
Unfortunately at the moment the new proofreading function doesn’t recognize the “div.” text when it is a playing technique and it will give warnings about “chord not playable” or whatnot because it ends up interpreting things as double/triple stops.
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I believe that proofreading will recognize “div.” as staff text.
Yeah, but I think then it doesn’t stack properly with other playing techniques, like often you want to have div. or unis. sitting nicely on top of con sord. or whatever.
Also then you can end up with inconsistencies - if you have to type it each time, it might sometimes be div. and other times Div. and maybe div without the period, especially if there are multiple people working on the same score. It is preferable to have it as a playing technique so the specific text used is forced. Or you may want to adapt to a different house style where it should be capitalized or not capitalized, and don’t want to have to edit each one individually, etc. I used to see those types of problems often in Sibelius scores, generally avoided in Dorico by using playing techniques for this.
That’s a very awkward way to do it. It’s very normal just to mark div on a string section part when that is requested, as opposed to double stops, which I indicate with a bracket. Yes the “proofreader” does not understand div and chides me for unplayable chords on the string part.
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I’m hopeful that they might be able to get the proofreading function to recognize “div.” and “unis.” text as a playing technique in the future. Also I know that string sections will 99% of the time recognize multiple notes on a staff as divisi and divide even if the courtesy “div.” is missing, so I feel the proofreader should interpret it the same way by default. Tim Davies goes so far as to say never to put div. and unis. on the score, that it is just a waste of ink since they will divide anyway.
If you want to use a playing technique for divisi, you can click the star icon in the Playing Techniques dialog after defining the technique to save it as a default, and then it will be available in all your documents. You can even assign a key command to it.
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I totally agree with you! It’s still effective to mark div sometimes, just for clarity. As I said before, I’ll mark a double stop with a bracket when that is what I want as opposed to divisi in the section.
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Thanks, I’ll try that.